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Monday, 29 September 2014

Not the prettiest title screen, but at least it's more cheerful than the music collection of sounds playing in the background when it comes up. I figured the game would be leaning more towards dumb comedy than grim psychological horror, but that shows what I know.

Hi, welcome to Super Adventures. I'm Ray Hardgrit and I know absolutely nothing about the first Postal game. I've played a lot of Postal 2 and I've heard that Postal 3 is so bad that developer Running With Scissors basically disowned it (in fact it's so bad that they added the game box into Postal 2 and you get an achievement for pissing on it), but the original Postal remains a mystery to me. I'll soon fix that though.(Fair warning: there's a good chance I'm going to end up calling the game 'Portal' instead of 'Postal', and it likely won't just be once, so try not to be confused if you catch me screwing up.)

Saturday, 27 September 2014

Today's 'P' game is POKéMON: Red Version! Okay there's no way I'm writing it out like that for the rest of this. I'll let it keep the acute accented é but that's where I draw the line.

I was surprised to find (because I know astoundingly little about the series) that the game is not called Pokémon in its native country. I mean I get that it's a portmanteau, but I assumed the name originated in Japan, like with 'Tamagotchi'. In fact the original Japanese title for this is basically just pronounced as 'Pocket Monsters'; so someone took a sensible English title and then mangled it up for the English release. It's a perfectly likeable mangled up name though, so I ain't complaining.

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Well this isn't a good sign: it looks like they've taken the title screen from an Apple II game. I do like the candle effect, but that has to be a contender for the worst looking game logo on the site so far.

Hi I'm Ray Hardgrit and this is Super Adventures, I play games for an hour or two and try to figure out what they are and if they're any good. Today game is indie RPG Paper Sorcerer, the debut title by UltraRunawayGames (aka. Jesse Gallagher), and no relation as far as I'm aware to Paper Mario.

I realise the game's been out for almost a year now so it's perhaps a bit late (or half a decade too early) to show it off, but it was gifted to me by a kind and hopefully patient reader, and I promised I'd write something about it. So that's what I'm doing.

(Click the pictures to open up a bigger version and get a better look at the art).

Saturday, 20 September 2014

Hi. Sorry for the long break but I'm still here I promise, and to prove it I bring you many pictures from Crystal Dynamic's 2005 FPS Project: Snowblind! I've been playing through all of the Deus Ex sequels this year, so it didn't seem right to leave out poor Snowblind even if it's not really part of the family. It was originally intended to be a multiplayer-focused Deus Ex spin-off called Deus Ex: Clan Wars you see, but Invisible War's crappy sales put an end to that plan. There's some obscure trivia just for you, taken straight from the first paragraph of its wikipedia page. I will of course only be examining the single player though, as that's what I do.

Just to shift subject for a second; I know this doesn't need to be said, but there's been some drama over game journalism lately and I feel like re-clarifying how Super Adventures works. I don't generally review games here, I show off a few hours of gameplay and report how I felt about them during and after playing this small fraction of the product. I salute those wise and learned game critics who can scientifically determine a game's objective worth down to a percent, but that's not a skill I have. I can only say whether or not I personally enjoyed my time playing it, share my first impressions, and provide for you a site full of my other opinions to judge my personal taste by.

You can't really call anything I do game journalism, I'm usually more of a snarky archaeologist, and the games I dig up are chosen by a team of experts consisting of myself and you guys. On the other hand I've got nothing against playing brand new games that are sent to me, and if there's ever been any conflict of interest due to my innumerous friendships with game developers I've always made it obvious enough for folks to make up their own minds about the bias in my rantings, and I always will. Probably.

Monday, 15 September 2014

And now, Super Adventures proudly presents another guest post by a bloke called mecha-neko.

Hey Ya!

I'm playing an early 3D action-adventure game for the PC called Outcast!

I never played this back when it was released in 1999 because it needed a far beefier computer than I could dream of. Outcast was made in the crazy days where 3D acceleration was a scary and new invention, so all the graphics were done on the CPU alone. Hell, 3D games were a scary and new invention at the time, and nobody had any idea how they should work. So Franck Sauer, Yves Grolet and Yann Robert, three truly invincible professionals (and names you may recognise from Agony), decided to show the world exactly how it should be done.

Saturday, 6 September 2014

This week's game is... damn has it really been a entire week since my last article? Anyway this week's 'O' game is 1996 arcade platformer Osman (AKA. Cannon-Dancer in Japan).

It's a spiritual sequel to the legendary Strider created by the same director, Kouichi Yotsui, but without Capcom's involvement... and that's pretty much the sum total of what I know about the game, so I'm not entirely sure what to expect from it. I'm reasonably certain at least that I've never played it before (I've barely even played Strider), but this title screen is reminding me of Knuckles' Chaotix and I hate it when games do that.

(Warning, there's going to be a lot of animated gifs this time, and they're going to be massive. Well, they sure have a lot of frames anyway.)

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For just the price of a cheap retro game you can help me keep writing about cheap retro games! Then you can sit back and feel smug about how generous you are afterwards.

The Rules

1. I must not use cheats, save states, trainers, hacking devices etc. to progress through the game. I play the game as it is and if I can't get any further then I quit. (Or run off to check a walkthrough.)

2. I must not read the manual before playing or play fan translations. I like to figure things out for myself and it's more amusing if I don't know what I'm doing.

3. I must not complete the games. I'm trying to take a quick look at interesting games, retro classics and obscure crap, show what they're like and show off the art, not make full 'Let's Play' playthroughs or reviews.

4. You must not read these posts if you're concerned about -- spoilers --.I may discuss the story and show screenshots of cutscenes and dialogue. But I try to make sure I'm only spoiling the game that I'm playing.